It’s a new year and it’s time to announce the latest literary endeavor from the Henry Miller Memorial Library: Ping Pong Free Press.

Ping-Pong Free Press understands itself as furthering Miller’s legacy by tapping into the contemporary literary and artistic milieu…If you are interested in submitting your work for our competition go HERE! 

Prize: 500.00 and 10 copies of your book published by the Henry Miller Memorial library’s imprint: Ping-Pong Free Press

More info about this endeavor below:

Contest opens on January 1st, 2016.

The Henry Miller Memorial Library champions the literary and artistic legacy of Henry Miller. This cannot mean only the writings of Miller himself. We may not have even know about Miller had it not been for Anais Nin. Miller existed at the peripheries of American literature, but his sources, and his influence, extend far beyond this country, to the international literary avant-garde.

Ping-Pong Free Press follows in the footsteps of its literary parent, Ping-Pong magazine and therefore sees itself as a current and vital part of that same impulse. It represents a living connection to the centers and peripheries of contemporary literary culture, both in the USA and beyond. As such, we are not looking for writing that is pretty.

Miller himself was not a pretty writer. But he was vital. That is why even when Miller was hardly read in the U.S., Kenneth Rexroth describes himself meeting “…miners in the Pyrenees, camel drivers in Tmelcen, gondoliers in Venice” who all asked, “Do you know M’sieu Millaire?” Ping-Pong Free Press will not be censored, will not bow to whimsy, will speak loudly in the face of injustice, will support those artists whose voices are sometimes silenced.  Thus American writers who exist, as Miller did for so much of his career, just under the radar of the mainstream literary world, will be represented by Ping-Pong Free Press.  

And just as Miller was and is as much an international literary figure as he was/is an American one, so too does Ping-PongFree Press seek to reach beyond our shores in order to bring unknown, or lesser known, writers from around the world into more prominence in English.  Ping-Pong Free Press understands itself as furthering Miller’s legacy by tapping into the contemporary literary and artistic milieu.

The writers and artists represented in the magazine Ping-Pong are heirs to Miller’s legacy, and were Miller alive and writing today, these would be his peers and contemporaries. It has been argued, accurately, in my opinion, that were Miller writing in 2015, he would be no more a part of the mainstream US literary world than he was in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s or 60’s. He was not a writer for the market. He would be denounced as vulgar, as obscene, as barbaric as he was then.

The work to be published in Ping-Pong Free Press is similarly not written for the market, but for the ages. It is challenging, it asks much of its reader. It’s not easy. It is, though, a vital continuation, and contribution, to Henry Miller’s literary legacy.

Once again, submit HERE!